In other news, the man who tortured office staff in every civilized country in the world and wasted billions of dollars in manpower over twenty years through system freezes, lost documents, and incompatible files, is leaving town big-time:

"Fifth space tourist set to blast off 08:28 06 April 2007 NewScientist.com news service Kelly Young

Microsoft's former chief architect Charles Simonyi is preparing to become the fifth private citizen to take a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket on Saturday.

Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov will be ferrying Simonyi to the station. Their Soyuz rocket is scheduled to take off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1730 GMT (1330 EDT).

Simonyi, the man behind Microsoft's Word and Excel programmes, says he has enjoyed the months he has spent training for the trip in Russia. "I view the space flight as kind of an exclamation point at the end of a very long sentence," Simonyi recently told reporters."

That's a poetic sentiment, but I notice no-one asked him what the sentence said or what court imposed it on him.

secondly, they are exciting a great many particles and no mention is made of any effort to help those particles release that excitement. This is cruel and inhumane! Can we stand by and allow this? No!

Well, okay, MM, but you're gonna put a lot of good-looking movie stars out of business...not to mention Paris Hilton, J Lo, and all them songbirds, web sites, and fashion models!!!

On the other hand if the Federal government has to step in to regulate this business of inducing excitement and relieving same...we may find ourselves with a reasonable solution to the prostitution problem!

I doubt electron tunneling produces waste materials or any detectable environmental impact otuside of natural processes. And where would you put safety equipment bigger than the experimental field anyway? Thans for your kind so-so words, there, MM. I feel much better, more or less. :D

Tunneling -- did they file an Environmental Impact Statement? Did they post the plans for the required period of public comment? Did they obtain the necessary permits? Do they own the subsurface rights of what they are tunneling under? Were the correct safety permits obtained? Was the bracing inspected as required? Were safety kits and air pacs easily available? And what did they do about waste materials -- just dump them in the nearest stream?

I have a feelign the these dudes are in big, big environmental trouble and that the lawsuits will go on and on and on.

The tunneling electron thingie though - Have these scientists been reported to the Society for the Protection of Elemental Particles? First, they admit they are ripping off a great many electrons - surely a crime morally if not in statute - secondly, they are exciting a great many particles and no mention is made of any effort to help those particles release that excitement. This is cruel and inhumane! Can we stand by and allow this? No!

For I tell you, as the least of our particles is treated, so shall we all.

"LECTRON TUNNELING IN ATOMS HAS NOW BEEN OBSERVED IN REAL TIME by a German-Austrian-Dutch team (Ferenc Krausz, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, ferenc.krausz@mpq.mpg.de) using light pulses lasting only several hundred attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second), providing new glimpses into an important ultrafast process in nature. An electron bound to an atom is at the bottom of a sort of energy hill. Escaping the atom usually requires the electron to get enough energy to roll over this hill. So for example, hitting an atom with a light pulse delivering photons of sufficient energy can allow the electron to escape. However, if an atom is bathed in a shower of lower-energy photons, there is the chance that an electron, if located at the periphery of the atom, can escape even though it doesn't have quite enough energy. This is through the phenomenon of quantum tunneling, in which there is a small chance that the electron can in effect burrow through the energy hill. The tunneling process is responsible for the operation of certain electronic components, such as scanning tunneling microscopes, Esaki (tunneling) diodes, and quantum-cascade lasers. And in nuclear fission, alpha particles (two protons plus two neutrons) are believed to escape the fracturing nucleus through tunneling. Yet the tunneling process occurs so quickly, on the scale of attoseconds, that it has not been possible to observe directly.

With the recent ability to create attosecond-scale light pulses--pioneered by Krausz and others--this is now possible. In the new experiment, a gas of neon atoms is exposed to two light pulses. One is an intense pulse containing low-energy red photons. The second pulse is an attosecond-length pulse of ultraviolet light. This ultraviolet attosecond pulse delivers photons so energetic that they can rip off an electron and promote a second one to the periphery of the atom, into an excited quantum state. Then, the intense red pulse, consisting of just a few wave cycles (peaks and valleys), has a chance to liberate the outlying electron via light-field-induced tunneling. Indeed, the researchers saw this phenomenon, predicted theoretically forty years ago but only verified now for the first time experimentally in a direct time-resolved study.

As each wave crest in the few-cycle red pulse coursed through the atoms, the electrons each time upped their probability of escaping through tunneling until it reached about 100%. The data indicate that, in this particular system, the electrons escape via tunneling in three discrete steps, synchronized with the three most intense wave crests at the center of the few-cycle laser wave. Each step lasts less than 400 attoseconds. (Uiberacker et al, Nature, 5 April 2007; also see press release with figures and more information at www.mpq.mpg.de)"

Amos said:I think Kali is kind of like Mom - but I think he's just getting confused because they both wear a garland of 52 skulls; well, that and the freshly dismembered head that MOM waves around occasionally.

Wow, my man Rapaire does get himself into the most inneresting tangles from time to time. This Kali Ma, now, another piece of work, but one at least more open to interpretation:

"The name Kali derives from the Sanskrit root word Kal meaning time. Nothing escapes from time. Her Tibetan Buddhism counterpart is named Kala, a male figure. Of the Hindu goddesses, Goddess Kali Ma is the most misunderstood. The Encyclopedia Britannica is very mistaken in this quote, "Major Hindu goddess whose iconography, cult, and mythology commonly associate her with death, sexuality, violence, and, paradoxically in some of her later historical appearances, motherly love."

It is partially accurate to say the Goddess Kali Ma is a goddess of death. However, She brings the death of the ego as the delusional self-centered view of reality. Nowhere in the sriptures is She seen killing anything but demons nor is She associated exclusively with the process of human dying like Yama the Hindu god of death. Both Goddess Kali Ma and Shiva are said to inhabit cremation grounds and devotees often go to these places to meditate. The purpose is not to glorify death but to overcome the I-am-the-body idea. The cremation grounds reinforce the idea that the body is a temporary.

Kali and Shiva are said to dwell in these places because it is our attachment to the body that gives rise to the ego. Kali and Shiva give liberation by dissolving the illusion of the ego. Thus we are the ever-existing I AM and not the impermanent body. This is emphasized by the scene in the cremation grounds.

Out of all the Devi forms, Kali is the most compassionate because She provides moksha or liberation to Her children. She is the counterpart of Shiva. They are the destroyers of unreality. When the ego sees Mother Kali it trembles with fear because the ego sees in Her its own eventual demise. An individual who is attached to his/her ego will not be able to receive the vision of Mother Kali and She will appear in a fear invoking or "wrathful" form. A mature soul who engages in spiritual practice to remove the illusion of the ego sees Mother Kali as very sweet, affectionate, and overflowing with incomprehensible love for Her children.

Ma Kali wears a garland made of 52 skulls and a skirt made of dismembered arms because the ego comes out of identification with the body. In fact, we are beings of spirit and not flesh. So liberation can only prevail when our attachment to the body comes to an end. Therefore, the skirt and garland are trophies worn by Her to represent the liberation of Her children from attachment to the finite body.

In two of Her hands, She holds a sword and a freshly severed head that is dripping blood. This represents a great battle in which she defeated the demon Raktabija. Her black (or sometimes dark blue) skin represents the womb of the unmanifest from which all of creation is born and into which all of creation will eventually return. Goddess Kali Ma is depicted as standing on a white skinned Shiva who is lying beneath Her. His white skin is in contrast to Her black or sometimes dark blue skin. He is showing a blissful detached look on His face. Shiva is pure formless awareness sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) while She represents "form" eternally sustained by the underpinning of pure awareness."

Mother, we aare glad you are alive Being now sixteen and nine-seventy-five We see with hope and clarity (almost) Ahead, thy seventeen-thousandth post. Although no more of King Khandu we read, And silent is the voice of Ancient Tweed, And freds and trollops all are gone, Yet we bold few will still press on. We'll get you there -- soon, if not now. This is our solemn BS vow. And then we'll rest, and have with thee Two chocolate cookies and three cups of tea.

That Koran is a piece of work, innit? No wonder they won't let people read it. Oy!!! Maybe its the translation, but it seems to be from some far-away context so obscure as to make it incomprehensible in 70% of its propositions.

Now, I have to add I am most disappointed that my truly brilliant efforts at epic poetry and profound sociological philosophical discourse on the meaning of Easter have neither of them brought me even a hiccup or burp of acknowledgement from the Aesthetic Judgement Panel of the Mudcat. I mean, a guy works his brains into a tizzy trying t' add some value, and what does he get? Mere echoes. Sheeshe. Sigh. Prophet in his own land, and all that, I suppose.

Do not fret if Mom sinks down. Toward the shadowy part of town, When the darkness breeds dark fear, And the threads all disappear! We can bring her back again, With a click, if we've a yen, And to make it better, men, Now she's sixteen-nine and ten!

Easter is, as we all know, a time of rising. It has manynoble precedents -- th erising of the morning sun (although it is actually a turning of the lowly Earth, in fact, but never mind that); the rising of our daily bread in the often, from a misformed mash to a crispy, elegant loaf; the rising of our cost of living, month upon month unto the furtherest month; and the rising of the dangerous seas as our waste products glitter in the air and heat the planet slowly up. The rising of tempers, like hot air baloons in the cognosphere, comes to mind, and the rising of creeks as the symbolic defeat of all well-laid plans (which would come true God willing and the creeks didn't).

COnsider, too, the rising of our mothers from their beds each morning, to undertake another day of effort and nurture and care and sacrifice that life itself might rise up and renew its place on our chaotic dustball. And finally, Easter is about the rising of our fathers. It is something not often remembered, but which deserves commemoration, that for each of us to be here at all, the great and the less great, somewhere in dark of night, behind a stable door, in some glowing clinic restroom, on snowy hill or spring-dappled field, a father had to rise. Rise to the occasion, as it were, which called on him to stand for something and make his contribution to the river of ferocious protoplasm cleaving its way into the future.

There are thousands of us, and each of us has a thousand friends, a thousand times a thousand; and how oft we forget the millions of earnest, passionate risings that had to be undertaken in order for our place on the madcap stage of living to even exist!

Where would we be without those torrid, dutiful risings? Our very existence would be cast down in the gloomy, fitful dust, never to take form, a waste of unused cells, a secret code of DNA wasted on the winds, without a hope. But this was not our fate, thanks to those sturdy rising men.

Therefore, let us give thanks to the million men who rose before us, and used well what life had given them to stand up for the future. Let us celebrate the risings of all men in their scores and thousands and billions back through the cellular stream to the dawn of history! Let us speak out in behalf of risings on Easter, and let us who can add to their golden number, and those who cannot, bring risings about in others, that all may acknowledge this debt to the stand-up stout-hearted souls who rose in the past that the future might live.

Who are these coming to the BS thread? To what green brown altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that post-- fruit of a fevered head, With all its silken overtones increased? What little town of blithering BS marts, Or mountain-built with peace gone from their hearts, Is emptied of this folk, to read these lines? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art overtaken by BS, ne'er to return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of poets, fantasies and plagiarism overwrought, With branching topics and the trodden Tweed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold rationale! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 'BS is truth, truth BS--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

But hell, I guess when you're operating a sticky-fingers campaign ya gotta take what you can get...

You still unravish'd bride of BSedness, Thou foster-child of cattle and slow time, Prairie historian, who canst thus express Flowers and grass more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy orifice Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or e'en in Phoenix itself? What men or gods are these? What maidens wroth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What tar and feathers? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, play not on; Not to the sensual ear, nor with sound endured. Pipe in silence ditties of no sound: Eldritch youth, beneath the trees, thou canst leave Thy song, and encouraged are to do so. Bald Lover, never, ever canst thou comb, Though combing near the goal — yet, do not grieve; Hair cannot grow there, so rub not thy head with loam, For ever wilt thou rub, and none shall grow!

This place is a real roller coaster, I must say. We zoom from epic poetry and mythic tales to the daily rigors of hosuecats and chirping digital alarms without batting an eye, albeit occasionally turning a hare. And in case that Bugs you:

I found it finally--the little chirps were not entirely directional--it kept sounding like it was from the next room. It turned out to be the little water detector that sits in the pan under my hot water heater. The battery needed changing. Meanwhile, I pulled down and blew out the insides of each of the detectors in my house. Can't hurt, but I was getting a tad frustrated at having nothing work.

Now to turn my attention to the late-middle-aged cat, who has been even more annoying in his complaints lately. He wants us to cuddle with him all of the time. I think he is ill--no weight loss yet, no jaundice, but I've noticed some blood on the stool in the litter box. I'll get him checked out, and won't make any decisions until the kids have had a chance to visit with him. He may have more time, perhaps diet alone will help, but I can't think this is something that will just go away on its own.

We were 16-8 and ninety-eight Just two from sixteen-nine. And the loom of seventeen thousand Was seen down past the line. Then with vicious broomstick waved aloft, We heard our Mother say, "Git out of bed, you worthless slouch! Move out! There's seventeen K!"

So we rubbed our eyes, and looked around, And fell into our clothes. And out the window, over the hill, Where the sun had lately rose, Why sure enough, a bright gold glow, Like the start of a second day Was brightening up the clouds below, The glow of Seventeen K.

We could see it shine like Gabriel's Horn, Where the heavens meet the dawn. And we swore our eyes were playing tricks, And blinked; but it wasn't gone. And all that morning it glittered there, Like an angel hard at play. And we knew in our hearts, we had better start Moving out for Seventeen K.

Now somewhere men are stern and glum, Where there burdens are too grim. Somewhere a man turn his back on life, 'Cuz it's just too much for him. And somewhere folks can't understand Why children laugh, and play. But the MOAB crew understand that, too, As they head for Seventeen K.

We know it's there, just over the hill If you look right, it's quite clear, Like the pale green flash on the ocean's back When the setting sun draws near. So just keep your calm, if the sons of Mom Gallop past, berserk but gay, And give them a smile as they make that mile That will bring on Seventteen K.

Ransom Arbuthnot StumpwhumperThe Voice from Over the Hill Olden, Yuppiz, Revivivien, eds. New York City, 2004